Re: [rox-devel] feature suggestion

Jonatan Liljedahl <lijon@...> wrote:
> Sure, fstab is great for static mountpoints, if allowed in $HOME, which i=
t > isn't neither for Linux (which I am running) nor ROX-Filer.
But this is fixable - if ROX were to accept it, and there were a mount
utility that used it, that could do a bit to pressure the kernel into
having a FreeBSD-eque user-mounting option, .
> devfs/udev is meant to provide a dynamic /dev with consistent naming of >=
devices. But the files therein are only devicefiles. There's a no way to
> get any information about any device except the name of the device node.
And all of the 1s and 0s on it. Simple shell utilities could easily
look at a particular device and read it for this information.
> HAL could for example be used to tell a user application that some
> hardware was added, and what kind of hardware it is, etc...
Surely the existing file-monitoring things could be used for this?
Monitor /dev for any new files.
>Or the user app could query HAL and ask it for a list of all available
> (plugged in) digital cameras or whatever.
ls /dev/photo-cameras ?
A better solution than HAL would, for me, be some kind of
standarisation on the structure of /dev. The adhocities in there seem
to be about the only reason shell tools couldn't do the same as HAL.
> The virtual directories inside the afuse mount isn't mount-points, but
> virtual directories that is actually a kind of links to the temporarily
> created mountpoints (which lives in /tmp).
Damn, I was hoping it created actual mountpoints inside it's mounted dir.
The various things that let you run arbitrary commands on physically
attaching a device look quite useful here: one can 'mkdir $mountpoint
&& mount ...'. For example
http://www.caia.swin.edu.au/reports/041130A/ looks like a good
solution here for FreeBSD, and there is much documentation on using
the HAL/ivman/mount combination for this on Linux.
Thinking on this more, I go back to something like this kind of
plug-and-play for networked stuff. For example, once
smb://OtherBox/SharedDocs appears on the network,
~/WinNetwork/OtherBox would be created and mounted via Samba. So long
it was designed properly, this would also work for, eg, sshfs.
> But, using fuse stuff in the shell is very easy, but not so easy in rox-f=
iler,
> unless you hack up AppDirs that mounts a fuse over itself.
Which mostly comes back to not having a good GUI to do the initial
setting up. I have a vision for this in mind, so I guess it's time for
me to learn PyGTK, like I've been meaning to for about 18 months...
--
Lennon Victor Cook
"He who receives an idea from me receives without lessening, as he who
lights his candle at mine receives light without darkening" - Thomas
Jefferson